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Senior Theses Honors College

5-5-2017

Ophelia's ReflectionKelley Kennedy

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Recommended CitationKennedy, Kelley, "Ophelia's Reflection" (2017). Senior Theses. 178.https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/senior_theses/178

OPHELIA'S REFLECTION

By

Kelley Kennedy

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for

Graduation with Honors from the

South Carolina Honors College

May 2017

Holly Crocker

Director of Thesis

Esther Richey

Second Reader

Steve Lynn, Dean

For South Carolina Honors College

Ophelia's Reflection

Table of Contents

Thesis Summary

I. Introduction

II. Ophelia's Sincerity

III. Hamlet, Polonius, and Ophelia's Models Subjectivity

IV. Ophelia on Hamlet's Stage

1. The Problem of Female Minds

2. Women as Mediums

3. The Womb in the Iconography of Hamlet

V. Ophelia Counters Hamlet's Model of Subjectivity

1. Ophelia's Iconographies

2. Ophelia's Alternative Tragic Model

VI. Ophelia and Meta-drama

1. Page-Centered and Stage-Centered Power

2. Interrogating The Primacy of Script

VII. Conclusion

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Thesis Summary

This project examines Ophelia's role in the thematic exploration of the nature of the

individual self in Shakespeare's Hamlet. First, I discuss the different models of subjectivity and

virtue that Ophelia embodies and by which characters around her judge her actions. Her father,

Polonius, espouses a form of Renaissance humanism that Shakespeare counters throughout the

play. He believes the imitation of noble qualities can affect inner goodness, and he demands

Ophelia's obedience of his instructions regarding noble conduct. In contrast, Hamlet locates

moral authority within the individual, and he dismisses Polonius' notions of elite self-

presentation as vulgar performances. Both men privilege the development of the individual as the

highest goal in ethical action, and Ophelia counters their ethics in two ways. First, she embodies

a different mode of subjectivity that privileges connection with others over self-promotion or

self-preservation, and she conceives of natural communion where Hamlet insists on the

impossibility of surmounting the barriers of self-interest between discrete selves. Second, her

fate registers the potential destructiveness of Polonius' and Hamlets' ethics: Polonius' restrictive

guidance fails to secure her a husband or to ensure that others treat her with dignity and respect.

Hamlet's single-minded pursuit of his personal conception of justice discards her feelings, her

reputation, and father's life as collateral, and her poignant madness undermines his self-

conception as a sincere individual suffering at the hands of corrupt others.

Next, I dive further into the ways in which Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia exposes

problems in the groundbreaking conception of individualist subjectivity he espouses.

Shakespeare uses Ophelia to register Hamlet's anxiety about the impossibility of accessing the

interiority of others and to underscore. His inconsistent attempts to repel and control her

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underscore his feelings of isolation and futility. I analyze the ways in which Hamlet's

preoccupation with Ophelia's virginity and Gertrude's womb contributes to a new iconography

that frames a discourse around his mode of subjectivity.

Additionally, I argue that Ophelia counters Hamlet's authority as a judge of character and

as the play's tragic center. Ever a conduit for symbolic orders that originate outside herself, she

channels alternative iconographies into the play both through her sustained association with

classical myth and pastoral comedy despite her location in a Machiavellian court and through her

importation of popular balladry into an elite play. I compare her true madness to Hamlet's

feigned madness and argue that Ophelia counters Hamlet's authority as tragic center in the play's

dramatic arc and suggests the possibility of an alternative form of tragedy in which there could

be room for restoration.

Finally, I explore the ways in which Ophelia contributes to and destabilizes the play's

depiction of individual character on the meta-dramatic level. The bodily immediacy of her

madness complements the play's thematic meditation on the problems of self-presentation by

underscoring the mediation of the actor. Just as the character Ophelia challenges the cogency of

moral codes that involve the unidirectional channeling of male will through obedient female

bodies, the body of the actor that plays her foregrounds the possibility for players to exert

authority over the playwright's script. Thus, on multiple levels she destabilizes a presumed

hierarchal order of meaning-making and, through her madness, suggests that performances and

expressions which are suggestive without resolving themselves into a fixed meaning have the

greatest affective and dramatic power.

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I. Introduction

All conflict in William Shakespeare's Hamlet hinges on the unbridgeable gap between

abstract, unverifiable truth and material, observable manifestation. The first and most

foregrounded iteration of this problem is the ghost's suspect appearance, and its revelation of

Claudius' treachery develops in Hamlet an obsession with verifying the real, hidden meanings

behind physical communications, signals, and events. Hamlet's distress regarding the

impossibility of accessing the interior thoughts of other people isolates him as it emphasizes the

“spokes” of manipulation that shape relations within Claudius' sycophantic court (3.3.19).

Ophelia is an interesting figure in this network of social performances because her interiority is

peculiarly opaque even in the shadowy, uncertain world of the play. Her immediate enactment of

Polonius' paternal directives and complete embodiment of her society's gender ideals obscures

her inward character. To Hamlet, Ophelia is “nothing”, a blank slate onto which he projects his

anxieties about the unknowability of inherent truth and the constructedness of moral and

symbolic order without much interference from her manifest personality (3.2.128).

Shakespeare locates Ophelia at the point of disjunction between sign and meaning in both

the central conflict of the play and its meta-dramatic exploration of genre and theatrical

production. Hamlet and Shakespeare both aim to translate an inward potentiality into embodied

reality—Hamlet to realize his plan for revenge and Shakespeare to transpose a story from inward

conception to embodied dramatic production, and both playwright and protagonist appropriate

Ophelia as a mediator for their respective aims. Hamlet uses Ophelia to manifest his inwardly

conceived plan in reality, and she mobilizes his lies. Shakespeare employs her as a medium for

communicating meaning, both at the level of the script, in which she conveys thematic message

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through dialogue and action, and at the level of performance, in which the body of the actor who

plays her—made uniquely noticeable through the physical spectacle of her madness—delivers

the script to the audience. At all of these levels of the play, Ophelia registers problems with

projects of transmission, foregrounds the processes of mediation they involve, and, in doing so,

destabilizes both Hamlet's and Shakespeare's claims to authority and credibility.

Hamlet takes up a model of individualist ethics, and he appropriates of Ophelia as an

instrument through which he can realize his inwardly conceived scheme of revenge in material

reality (Crocker 39). In order to justify his destructive manipulation, he must convince himself of

the inferiority or nonexistence of Ophelia's inner character, and he frames her alternately as a

frigid virgin and empty-hearted artificer. A discarded intermediary in a struggle of masculine

will, Ophelia cannot survive. However, her poignant madness suggests something of the

character that lies beneath the multiple and contradictory projections that obscure it and suggests

that some great potential is lost because she is denied the right—which Hamlet claims without

any reservations—to express her own inner will.

Ophelia also counters Shakespeare's claims to authorial authority at the level of the meta-

drama by highlighting the power of the actor over the impact of a production. Moreover, her

incongruous association with neoclassical symbols and her disjunctive importation of popular

ballads onto the elite stage destabilizes Hamlet's claims for the superiority of the play as a

dramatic form by foregrounding its imperfections as a “mirror” to society and contrasting its

particular distortions with the assumptions of other dramatic modes (3.2.23).

II. Ophelia's Sincerity

Hamlet and Ophelia begin the play in analogous positions, both bound by loyalty to the

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directives of a paternal figure whose claim to authority is uncertain. Ophelia's unquestioning

obedience to Polonius despite his generally acknowledged stodginess and senility foils Hamlet's

reluctant reception of the ghost's orders, which trouble him because of the ghost's uncertain

identity and the incompatibility of its violent command with his own temperament. In contrast to

Hamlet's isolation, Ophelia figures as an extreme dependent, controlled by male characters to the

extent that examining the ways in which she responds to and attempts to negotiate the various

influences of masculine will in her life is essential to understanding her subjectivity.

Throughout most of the play, Ophelia's thoughts and motivations remain concealed,

surfacing only in glimpses of expressed emotion that are either completely unobserved or

entirely discounted by other characters. Yet the language with which she describes Hamlet's

“mad” episode in her chamber is vivid, imaginative, and emotional; she reports that he appeared

“with a look so piteous in purport / As if he had been loosed out of hell / To speak of horrors”

(2.1.78). She expresses profound grief for Hamlet's sake when she witnesses his apparent

madness—“O, woe is me / T' have seen what I have seen”— and she makes her mournful remark

after Hamlet has made his exit and cannot hear her, indicating that she expresses a genuine

feeling (3.1.174). Thus, in contrast to Hamlet's accusation in 3.2 that she lies and “jigs”,

Ophelia's demeanor registers only mystery and a quiet, ineffable dignity, for, unlike her

ridiculous father, she speaks with simplicity and intelligence (3.1.156).

However, Ophelia's internal feelings, from what little the text reveals of them, are often

incongruous with her external expressions—her words, gestures, and actions. The first question

that Hamlet asks Ophelia is, “Are you honest?” (3.2.105). Ophelia is confused because the term

“honesty” has multiple meanings—goodness, truthfulness, and chastity. While during the rest of

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the exchange Hamlet interrogates Ophelia based on the latter form of honesty, the question's

location in the context of their conversation also registers Hamlet's uncertainty about Ophelia's

truthfulness. It is likely that Hamlet wonders why she abruptly ends their courtship then implies

through the vulnerability of her statement that his poetry was “of so sweet breath compos'd / As

made the things more rich” that she is still to some extent infatuated (3.1.100). While she does

not seem, as Hamlet suspects, artfully duplicitous, she also does not seem sincere.

Sincerity, in the words of Lionel Trilling, is the “congruence between avowal and

feeling”, and it is a virtue that concerns an individual's self-presentation to others (Trilling 3).

Ophelia's character is not easily decipherable as one of sincerity or insincerity because her

choices and expressions convey too little about her inward desires for other characters to gauge

the honesty of her self-presentation. When Polonius orders her to end her courtship with Hamlet,

she responds only by expressing the fervor and apparent genuineness of Hamlet's love gestures,

saying nothing of her own feelings, and ultimately defers with little resistance (3.110-114). In

her account of Hamlet's theatrical visitation to her chamber, she does not report to have said or

done anything but stood passive and “affrighted” throughout the encounter, and she tells

Polonius that she does not discuss her decision to cease romantic communication with Hamlet

but only “did repel his letters and denied his access” to her (2.2.121). She participates in

Polonius' self-serving plan to spy on the prince in service of the King and Queen apparently

without any statement of opinion on the scheme, and her involvement is legible both as loyalty to

Polonius and as disloyalty to Hamlet; it suggests nothing of her internal character other than her

passivity. More than Claudius, whose insincerity involves a plain misrepresentation of inward

reality in the familiar form of the classic Elizabethan villain, or Polonius, Rosencrantz,

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Guildenstern, and the various other self-serving dissemblers whose motivations for deceit are

recognizable, Ophelia registers the existence of an unbridgeable gap between visual sign and

concealed truth. It is never clear how much Ophelia refrains from expressing, and because

Shakespeare never completely unveils the unseen truth about her inner self—not even through

dramatic irony—she foregrounds the disjunction between inwardness and manifest

representation.

III. Polonius', Hamlet's, and Ophelia's Models of Subjectivity

Hamlet initially finds Ophelia opaque because she does not express her inward states but

mimes Polonius' instructions, and for much of the play she espouses her father's humanist

conception of right conduct. Polonius conceives of virtues as abstract ideals that exist outside the

self and that can be attained through instruction and mimesis (Trudell 46). He articulates his

philosophy to Laertes before his departure, urging him to carefully mediate his expressions of

inward thoughts: “Give thy thoughts no tongue, / Nor any unproportioned thought his act. / Be

thou familiar but by no means vulgar” (1.3.68). This advice articulates an ethics that involves

kindness to others within certain boundaries of individual interest and emphasizes the cultivation

of the individual moral character through observation and learning rather than embodiment of

virtuous impulses such as generosity, or, in Ophelia's case, love. However, he does not extend

the promise of the transformative effect of this kind of mimetic virtuousness to Ophelia; while

Laertes may hope to achieve through virtuous living a state in which he is true to both his own

self and his fellow man, Ophelia's short “tether” does promise her a way to realize her inward

character and achieve harmony between it and the material world, but only to set her

“entreatments at a higher rate” and raise her value as a commodity (1.3.131-134).

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Ophelia's response to Laertes' “good lesson” regarding her chastity reveals that she has

been given an extensive education in the importance and methodology of this humanist mode of

self-expression and conduct; she urges him to avoid becoming a hypocrite who “recks not his

own rede”, indicating her sense that both she and her brother are participants in a linked

economy of instruction and advice and illustrating her adeptness “in humanist styles of thought”

(Trudell 64). She takes this humanist tenent of miming the directives of a superior to a singular

level. When she exchanges Hamlet's letters for Polonius' prayerbook, she substitutes Polonius'

directives for Hamlet's messages figuratively and literally and demonstrates that she sees herself

as a “repository” for these instructive messages (Trudell 64). Ophelia's fate suggests the

consequences of this mode of thinking: the disjunction between Ophelia's prior deportment and

mad presence in Act IV underscores the fact that her exemplary noble conduct fails to “effect the

transition from daughter to wife” and leaves her vulnerable and grieving (Bialo 301).

In contrast to Polonius' belief in the primacy of outward excellence, Hamlet privileges the

internal to the extent that he believes his inward intentions excuse the consequences of any

actions he takes to accomplish them. After killing Polonius he tells Gertrude:

Forgive me this my virtue,

For in the fatness of these pursy times

Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg,

Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good (3.4.173-176).

Hamlet locates both meaning-making and moral action absolutely within himself and imagines

an individualist model of subjectivity in which, as he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “there

is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.268-269). Thus, according to Hamlet,

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all trustworthy meaning and legitimate signification comes from within the bounded space of the

individual mind, into which no aid can come in the form of advice nor relief come in the form of

friendship or love. He literalizes his intention to shut out advice when he tells Ophelia to

physically cage her maxim-spouting father: “Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play

the fool nowhere but in's own house” (3.1.144). Thus, to enact his will according to this model,

he cannot collaborate with others, but must dominate them. He attempts to “instrumentalize”

other characters, to render them “crude” matter that he can manipulate (Trudell 73). While

Polonius justifies his control over Ophelia by infantilizing her, insisting she think herself a

“baby”, Hamlet denies her personhood entirely: she is not a sinner but a “breeder of sinners”, he

protests that women like her “nickname God's creatures”, implying not only that she is not

herself one of God's creatures but also that she does not properly understand or engage with them

(3.1.157). Hamlet intends these dehumanizing figurations of Ophelia to justify the primacy of his

individual subjectivity and thereby excuse his domination of others.

It is thus fruitless for Gertrude to hope in the potential affective power of Ophelia's

embodied goodness introduces a formulation of subjectivity and moral action that differs from

either Hamlet's or Polonius'. It suggests that virtues are inwardly generated qualities that

manifest in material excellence as virtuous actions: they “grow organically, connecting body and

soul, human and divine, subject and community” (Crocker 36). According to this view, goodness

may be spread through communion:

And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish

That your good beauties be the happy cause

Of Hamlet's wildness: so shall I hope your virtues

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Will bring him to his wonted way again,

To both your honours (3.1.42-46).

Ophelia affirms the Queen's view in this scene, and she further illustrates her belief in the

circulation of virtue when she addresses Hamlet in 3.1. Her statement that “Rich gifts wax poor

when givers prove unkind” suggests that outward excellence borrows its beauty and “perfume”

from inward goodness (3.1.108). Moreover, as Rebecca Laroche points out, her distribution of

flowers in Act IV not only registers as a condemnation of the faithlessness of the court she

addresses but also as a literal attempt to heal herself and others by circulating herbs with natural

medicinal qualities (LaRoche 215). Her attempts to circulate cures registers her madness as a

more revealing embodiment of Ophelia's inner mind—broken though it is—than her prior

obedience. Moreover, her mad utterances evidently attempt to describe what has happened to her

and further illustrate that she is trying to give voice to her inward emotions as she does not when

she is sane. However, as Holly Crocker points out, “this play’s relentless focus on the individual

prison of harms […] means that Ophelia’s virtues cannot circulate” (Crocker 45). Shakespeare

illustrates the consequences of Hamlet's enclosed isolation: his mind becomes stifling and

corrupt—an echo-chamber of misery that breeds distrust and violence rather than goodness and

honor. Likewise, the dark, enclosed space of the castle, fortified against invaders, allows that

which is “rotten” (1.5.100) to fester until there is immense destruction and “havoc” (5.2.403).

Subjectivity and Theatricality

The characters of Hamlet create and interpret outward expressions according to their

respective views of subjectivity, individual goodness, and the possibility of connection. Polonius'

conception of identity is based primarily on social rank and roles and he believes self-

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presentation forges and preserves that identity. He advises Laertes to conduct himself nobly not

to express an inherent noble wisdom or goodness but to attain these things through practice. His

axiom that clothing “oft proclaims the man” suggests not only that he sees a deep connection

between outward expression and inwardness but that he privileges outward expression over

inward states and believes that external behavior can affect inward goodness (1.3.78). He frames

Ophelia's sympathy with Hamlet as a lapse not only in judgement of social strategy but in her

very understanding of her inner self: “You do not understand yourself so clearly / As it behooves

my daughter and your honor” (1.3.97-98). In his view, outward expressions must assure the

inheritance of unified wisdom through learning and remembering, honor filial superiors, and

preserve social reputations. Moreover, he believes language and expression must delineate and

preserve “sumptuary order” and maintain instructive superiority across hierarchies of gender and

class (Trudell 64).

Ophelia espouses Polonius' view of right conduct for much of the play. Hamlet and

Ophelia's encounter in 3.2 occurs when she has freshly reaffirmed her link to the “humanist

economy” of noble, instructive speech through her submission to her father. She trusts, if not in

the sincerity of communication—the congruence between a message and its sender's inward

thoughts—then in her ability to at least locate the source of a message and understand her

relationship with the sender and, by extension, her place in an ordered social world (Trudell 65).

Her confusion when Hamlet accosts her in 3.1 reveals her belief that expressions in the social

world correspond to inward feelings, obscured only by the simple misdirections of lustful men as

her father warned her; her conception of social communication is not deeply problematic as

Hamlet is. Her attempt to return Hamlet's “remembrances” underscores her preoccupation with

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generative source of messages; she feels compelled to neutralize the effect of Hamlet's suit by

returning the messages to their creator. Hamlet denies authorship, making these letters the

second example in the play of expressive matter without a legible source and highlighting

Hamlet's mounting concern over the unreliability of the ghost's command. Material that cannot

be traced back to a source is divorced from verifiable meaning, leaving it subject to

interpretation. Ophelia's belief that “to the noble mind / Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove

unkind” underscores the fact that she expects expressions to correspond to inward, noble

intentions, and her association of this ethic with her possession of a noble mind reveals that she

understands the relationship between expressive matter and source as a part of the economy of

legitimacy to which she belongs.

Ophelia's mournful response to Hamlet's performance of madness in 3.1 hinges on her

understanding of how his feigned madness departs from that aristocratic legitimacy:

O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!

The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's, eye, tongue, sword,

The expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion and the mould of form,

The observ'd of all observers,—quite, quite down! (3.1.167).

Her evaluation of Hamlet's madness suggests that in her view, or rather in Polonius' view, the

noble mind is one that mimics elite ideals that denote the elevated status of the “courtier, scholar,

soldier” in a way that is coherent and pleasing, and she understands his madness in terms of his

unmooring from modes of thought and discourse that connect the inner self to this sense of order

(3.1.168). This portrait of nobility suggests that noble communication should enable princes to

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imitate the substance of their thoughts in such a way as to make them “worldly”, and that this

unified transmission of the unidirectional momentum of his will is how he might “princely

governance” in the material world (Trudell 65). His loss of faith in this ability to bridge the

connection between inwardness and reality via communication is central to his new, isolated

notion of subjectivity. He also signals his rejection of the inherent significance of language when

he tells Polonius in the previous scene that he is reading “Words, words, words”; Polonius'

inquiry about the “matter” of the words foregrounds Hamlet's distrust of the stabilizing

proposition that word and significance are concomitant (2.2.210). Hamlet tells Polonius he reads

“Slanders” of a “satirical rogue”, suggesting his literary engagements are outside the bounds of

legitimate instructive endeavors (2.2.214). His suggestion that the book's “mockery” of

ridiculous old men is true but inappropriate—“I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold

it not honesty to have it thus set down”—suggests that that the serious and noble “matter” of the

works Polonius would have been expecting a Prince to read gloss certain parts of reality and

form a representation of the world whose nobility and cogency necessitates a selection of fact

(2.2.220). Hamlet thus discounts the performance of noble virtues as mere performances rather

than legitimate moral endeavors.

Conversely, Ophelia's “devotional reading” in 3.1 registers as a distinctly humanist

engagement with an art object, because Polonius directs both the action of reading and the choice

of text. Moreover, the act of reading a prayer book registers as a pursuit of knowledge

acquisition that is firmly within the bounds of humanist aristocratic tradition (Trudell 64). That

she reads only to fool Hamlet in accordance with Polonius' scheme underscores the way in which

Ophelia's mimetic mode is “more than humanist” – her mimesis of noble pursuits does not

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imagine a path to attaining nobility of her own, much less to achieving the alignment of thought,

speech, and social power necessary to manifest her will, but simply to mime her father's

directives (Trudell 64). Her mimesis of Polonius' instruction is so performative as to suggest the

obedience of an actor to a director; Polonius gives her the the prayer book like a prop and gives

orders for how she is to move and act when Hamlet encounters as if he were giving stage

directions.

The kind of aristocratic social performance Polonius encourages parallels the player's

performance of Priam's speech in 2.2. The actor integrates himself into the performance to the

extent that he feels the emotions of the character whose role he is playing. This constitutes a

kind of backward sincerity that impresses Hamlet even as it counters his belief that the inward

feelings of the individual are the highest sources of meaning. The idea that theatrical

performances can evoke emotions in performers as sincere as those connected to real events

counters Hamlet's insistence on the emptiness of Ophelia's apparent “honesty” and undermines

his claim for the higher reality and cogency of his own internal feelings (3.1.122). He posits that

he has a greater “motive and cue for passion” than the player, but because of the uncertainty of

the ghost's true identity it is possible that he, too, is driven by a “nothing” just as the player

weeps for “Nothing!” during his performance. Moreover, his reluctance to act and apparent

anxiety over his relative lack of passion-driven agency suggests the possibility that Hamlet's fury

—contained entirely in his mind though it is—may also be a mere performance. Thus, Hamlet

suggests that the most earthly creatures can say about the sources of the meanings that constitute

individual and cultural reality is that they come from “nothing”; thus, according to Scott Trudell,

“we are forced to confront the play’s generalized sense of paranoia that actions, ideas, and works

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of art are fully embedded in their environment, leaving limited opportunity for individual will”

(Trudell 74).

While Hamlet questions the sincerity of all expressions and the legitimacy of outward

expressions, he believes—or wants to believe—in the primacy of higher, prior meaning

generated within the individual. While he decries the social performances of his peers as vulgar

deceptions and denies the ability of communications to facilitate connection between individuals,

he believes he can force others to be forthcoming by staging theatrical traps that expose their

concealed inwardness with emotional impact. In contrast, Ophelia demonstrates an impulse to

communicate with others through outward expressions of goodness and affection in her reception

of Hamlet's seemingly “honourable” love displays and, later, her distribution of healing herbs

(1.3.119). These expressions show that she envisions possibilities of wholesome connection

rather than manipulation or instruction, and Polonius rebukes and Hamlet discounts and exploits

this emotional receptivity.

Ophelia's appropriation of popular ballads constitutes an even more radical break from

respectable discourse than that of Hamlet's feigned madness, and it counters Hamlet's conception

of theatricality by coupling a more stylized, performative mode of expression with a stronger and

more coherent indication of genuine emotion. Without Polonius' will to guide her, Ophelia seems

to tap into a reserve of cultural knowledge in search of a voice. The gentleman who brings word

of her madness denies that she is attempting to communicate real meaning and says “her speech

is nothing”. His view and Gertrude and Claudius' attempts to quiet her suggests that those around

Ophelia do not consider what inner significances her words might have and that they define her,

as her father did, by her capacity to absorb information from the world outside herself (Lyons

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69). Ophelia has lost the person who kept the “key” of her mind in the sense that he controlled

her education (1.3.93). Now that Polonius does not hand her books to read and does not tell her

when to read them, the repository of her mind rejects not the lowest “lauds” (4.7.202). Given

Polonius and Laertes' associations of chastity with prudent “thrift” in the economy of sex,

Ophelia's channeling of multiple sources registers as a kind of ideological looseness rather than

an anarchic passivity (Lyons 69). Hamlet's insulting comparison of Rosencrantz to a “sponge”

that soaks up the praise and instruction of others befits this formulation of her character and

subtly prefigures Ophelia's saturated, sinking death at the end of Act IV (4.2.12). Gertrude's

framing of Ophelia's drowning as a passive act by a woman “incapable of her own distress”

figures her death as a surrender to the pull of gravity which also registers as an absolute

acceptance of all happenings, all forces, and all significations through the medium of her body

(4.7.203).

Although her madness prevents her from expressing herself in her own voice, Laertes'

belief that the “nothing” of her speech is “more than matter” rings true—using voices

appropriated from popular ballads, she expresses the sorrow of a woman abandoned by a suitor

and grieves the dead (4.5.198). Although she must use scripts that originate from outside herself,

her mediation invests them with poignant if unfixed meaning. In subtler ways, many other

characters in the play take up this same process of expressing inwardly generated emotion with

outwardly defined expressive language and ritual—even Horatio, who Hamlet identifies as the

character who best embodies his own unshowy moral uprightness casts himself as an ancient

Roman.

However, Hamlet decries the insincerity of these kinds of appropriations of emotive

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performance throughout the play: in his first lines he protests that the ritualistic expressions of

grief do not “denote” him truly, and the “bravery” of Laertes' grief sends him into a “tow'ring

passion” because it strikes him as theatrical (5.2.89). However, his refusal to use any put-on

expressions to embody his grief masks his own anxiety that all of his grief, too, is really

performed and he struggles to confirm and understand his own emotions. That Ophelia's

performative grief is loosed by her insanity while Hamlet's madness is feigned further

undermines Hamlet's claims to greater sincerity and to the occupation of the centered position of

tragic hero (Pollard 1062).

IV. Ophelia on Hamlet's Stage

The Problem of Female Minds

Hamlet's undertaking of individualist ethics necessitates his ability to maintain control of

those around him. His inability to confirm what other people are thinking or feeling threatens and

isolates him, and the loneliness and misery it causes drive the play's tragic pathos. While this

“problem of other minds” colors almost all relationships between characters in the play,

Shakespeare foregrounds Hamlet's anxieties about Ophelia and Gertrude's hidden inwardness

(Maus 6). For Hamlet, Gertrude's betrayal is more deeply traumatic than Claudius' villainy

because while Claudius is the primary object of Hamlet's wrath, his betrayal does not upend a

previous, deeply held “construction of interior discourse” as does Gertrude's inconstancy (Maus

6). The fact that he is a self-serving dissembler through-and-through makes his betrayal legible

as an act with a kind of congruence between Hamlet's external perception and internal reality.

Hamlet hints that Claudius was never generally respected in Denmark before his coronation:

though the common people now give “five, twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats apiece for his

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picture in little”, they “would make mouths at him while my father lived” (2.386-389).

Moreover, Shakespeare establishes from the outset of the play that Hamlet has never placed

Claudius in high esteem; even before the ghost tells him of Claudius' treachery, Hamlet

expresses his sentiment that his father is to Claudius as a “Hyperion to a satyr” (1.2.144).

Hamlet's conversation with Horatio and Marcellus after the ghost's visitation underscores the fact

that Claudius' duplicity is not the most interesting part of the play's examination of the gap

between sign and that which is signified; when Hamlet reports that the ghost informed him

“There's never a villain dwelling in all Denmark / But he's an arrant knave”, Horatio replies that

this truism “needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave / To tell us this” (1.5.137-140).

Rather, it is Gertrude's “frailty” that most affects Hamlet, and when he hears the ghost's

revelation, he responds first to his mother's treachery: “O most pernicious woman!” (1.5.106).

Hamlets quip in 3.2 that Ophelia could make monsters of good men smacks of real

resentment but precedes any real aggravating action on Ophelia's part. The obliqueness of his

insults reveal that Hamlet's distrust is an extension of his generalized resentment and suspicion

of womankind which is rooted in his resentment and suspicion of his mother. Moreover,

Hamlet's doubt regarding Ophelia's “honesty” and his accusation that she couches “wantonness”

in “ignorance” underscores his preoccupation with her unverifiable virginity (3.1.158). The

mystery and primacy of Ophelia's virginity foregrounds the play's examination of the

problematical distinctions between the abstract and the material; virginity registers this gap

because it is a bodily state that is so deeply hidden within the body that it is as invisible and

unverifiable as thought.

Hamlet is also preoccupied with women's capacity to manipulate men through sexual

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allure, and he accuses both Ophelia and Gertrude of the shameful deception of wearing makeup.

To Ophelia, he says, “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God hath given you one

face, and you make yourselves another”, speaking once more as if she were a representative for

her sex (3.2.154). When speaking to Yorick's skull, Hamlet says of Gertrude, “let her paint an

inch thick, to this favour she must come,” registering a dark satisfaction that death will one day

surmount all attempts to conceal a truth, even one so seemingly innocuous as a woman's true

face (5.1.201). Claudius, too, demonstrates this kind of anxiety regarding the possibilities of

feminine misrepresentation when he compares the measures he takes to hide his treachery to the

use of “plastering art” and “painted word” to conceal the rouged falsity of the “harlot’s cheek,”

(3.1.50–52).

Women as Mediums

The gap between inwardness and external, embodied reality not only distresses Hamlet

because it prevents him from seeing the hidden interiority of others—women in particular—but

also because it prevents him from effectively channeling his inward will into the material world.

Even Hamlet's mistaken act of killing Polonius requires a “medium”—in this case it is the arras

that comes between himself and the material consequences of his actions (Trudell 73). Hamlet

first achieves this process of mediated outward projection through The Mousetrap, which

successfully verifies Claudius' guilt. This enterprise is successful because Hamlet is adept at

manipulating the medium of art. However, when art has fulfilled its highest purpose to “show

virtue its own feature” and revealed Claudius' concealed guilt, Hamlet needs a new medium to

manifest his verified purpose.

Thus, Hamlet's obsession with verifiability takes on a different register in his interactions

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with female characters because he seeks not only to confirm their inward state but also to control

them and verify his control. Hamlet's first attempt to manipulate a woman is his appropriation of

Ophelia as an intermediary for establishing belief in his feigned madness at court. His first act

after seeing the ghost is to make his appearance in Ophelia's bedroom, where he begins his

sustained theatrical performance of insanity. Ophelia's description of this encounter underscores

the marked physicality of his manipulation of her:

He took me by the wrist, and held me hard;

Then goes he to the length of all his arm;

[…] Long stay'd he so;

At last,--a little shaking of mine arm,

And thrice his head thus waving up and down,--

He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound

As it did seem to shatter all his bulk

And end his being: that done, he lets me go” (2.1.99-113).

Ophelia's remark that Hamlet's anguish seems to “shatter all his bulk” underscores the fact that

Hamlet feels he cannot contain the ghost's mission and registers this moment as his attempt to

displace his will into the container of Ophelia's body. The way in which Hamlet physically

handles Ophelia suggests that he is making a symbolic attempt to transfer his own agency

through bodily contact. In 3.4, Hamlet physically maneuvers Gertrude's body in front of the

mirror, echoing his encounter with Ophelia in her closet and suggesting that Hamlet views

women as sites where he can displace the burden of his responsibility as an agent and his

“conviction that he can act or perform ideas only through the intermediary” of a woman's body

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(Trudell 73).

In animating Ophelia, Hamlet seeks to overcome his distinctly masculine impotence: the

inability to control his own destiny and to secure his inheritance of power and property. His

inaction makes him feel not only frustrated but emasculated, and he reprimands himself for being

a “coward” who “lacks gall” and “unpacks his heart with words” rather than actions “like a

whore” (2.2.614). It is thus fitting that he responds to this inertia by attempting to establish

absolute control over the women closest to him.

The Womb in the Iconography of Hamlet

Hamlet's impulse to execute his father's will through the intermediary of female bodies

leads to his fixation on the womb, the “permeability” of which figures the capability to “transfer

from inside to outside” (Maus 194). Hamlet's remark to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that “I

could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have

bad dreams” reveals that his own body is a “prison”, not because it is too small to contain his

will but because it entraps the nightmares, doubts, and miseries associated with his willed task

within his mind. The force of his will is so great that he cannot contain and mobilize it, and it

grows to crippling proportions with his doubt and hair-splitting. After he verifies Claudius'

villainy, he despairs that he is “unpregnant” of his cause; the fact that he couches his intent to

enact revenge in terms of childbirth suggests that his attempts to control Ophelia and Gertrude

hinge on a desire to appropriate their bodily ability to deliver (Trudel 73).

Hamlet despairs of his mother's relationship with Claudius and associates the king's

psychological control of his mother with sexual occupation. His language in 3.4 indicates that he

views his mother's vagina as a point of access to her that, being occupied by Claudius,

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figuratively cuts off his access to her; he is not sure she will listen to him.

...let me wring your heart: for so I shall,

If it be made of penetrable stuff;

If damned custom have not braz'd it so

That it is proof and bulwark against sense (3.4.43-46).

The literal meaning of the “damned custom” to which Hamlet refers is Gertrude's coupling with

Claudius, and Hamlet phrases his anxiety that he has lost the ability to penetrate his mother's

heart in terms of bodily access, couching his fear that corrupt Claudius' penetration of her

precludes Hamlet's access to her as like a “bulwark”. Hamlet's imploration that Gertrude look on

the “inmost parts of you” when he holds up the mirror also connects the womb—implicitly

referenced through the Biblical term “inmost parts”—to Gertrude's unobservable interiority

(3.4.25). Thus, Hamlet's obsession with his mother's body also registers as a response to his

frustration over the “problem of other minds” and the impossibility of verifying her inward

thoughts (Maus 6). To physically be inside of a Gertrude is the ideal, figurative solution to his

distrust of her external communications. The extent of Hamlet's anxiety also illustrates his belief

that a woman’s interiority is particularly unseeable: “The female interior encloses experiences

unappropriable by an observer: adultery, orgasm and so forth are unseeable and possible” (Maus

193).

In addition to symbolizing a capacity deliver that which is formed within to the external

world, Hamlet sees in the womb a space that is “appealing” because of its quality of being

“protected by opaque bodily parameters” which suggest a figurative insulation from the

treachery and unfairness of the external world (Maus 193). Hamlet sometimes expresses his

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inability to cope with the misery of his life in terms of his own bodily incapacity: he wishes that

his “flesh would melt” and considers ending his life. The body insulates the “vulnerable”, inward

center of human identity from the external world, but Hamlet expresses figuratively that the

horror of what is contained inside him is so corrosive as to be harmful to his body (Maus 193).

For Hamlet, the female body represents a more idyllic refuge for the vulnerable human

interiority than his own because it promises another kind of enclosure. According to Katharine

Eisamen Maus, for Renaissance men the womb represented a space of freedom within a “clearly

bounded and delimited space”, where the limitations of the frontier could afford them the

complete control upon which liberty depends (Maus 192). Its recognizable barriers prevent the

infiltration of the external world which threatens the integrity of the internal will. Thus, for

Hamlet, Gertrude's womb stands in for the nutshell in which he would feel himself “king of

infinite space”, and it represents a refuge within knowable limits which promises deliverance

from his tortuous moral uncertainty (Maus 193).

Hamlet's desire to take refuge in the female body is more than a figurative displacement

of his sense of his agency but also a register of his despair and self-loathing. Hamlet fixates on

the potential for Ophelia's womb to be a “breeder of sinners”, and his admission that “I could

accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me” suggests that his desire

to “penetrate” his mother is a part of his desire to undo his sins and return to a state of childhood

in which he had no will at all (3.4.44). He desires not only to displace his will and agency onto

women but for them to absorb his guilt and adulthood agency. Moreover, the desire for Ophelia's

virginal intactness he expresses when he encourages her to go to disbelieve all men and go to a

nunnery reveals his desire to make Ophelia's womb a kind of imaginative refuge from sin. He

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would like for Ophelia to remain pure, not for later union with himself—for it seems clear that he

has no intention of pursuing her—but to provide an embodied ideal of the possibility of an

unsullied and innocent person in a fallen world. This desire suggests the possibility of a kind of

underhanded pathos in Hamlet's sexual jokes with Ophelia in 3.2, in which he expresses his

desire to be between her legs, obsessively brings up her vagina, and wants to lay his head in her

lap like a child. Hamlet's figurative desire to reoccupy the womb is a desire for occupation

involves more than sex; according to Hamlet, the only pure and honest union between man and

woman is realized not through intercourse but when a mother carries her son within her body.

Moreover, Hamlet's preoccupation with the womb underscores the fact that he does not see the

possibility of any connection between individuals because they are discrete subjects, utterly cut

off from one another by the physical boundaries of their bodies; the only connection he can

imagine involves the literal removal of this physical separation. This formulation of the self is

like an enclosed womb that cannot conceive, and just Hamlet's isolation renders him

“unpregnant”, nothing can grow in the walled enclosure of Elsinore (2.2.595). Hamlet's espousal

of this model of radically individualistic subjectivity rots his kingdom's generative potential, and

Ophelia hails the consequences when she announces that the violets “wither'd all” when Hamlet

killed Polonius (4.5.208).

V. Ophelia Counters Hamlet 's Model of Subjectivity

Hamlet stages the consequences of Hamlet's mode of individualist subjectivity: without

meaningful connection between individuals, there can be no restoration or fertility. Ophelia

presents a model of tragic protagonist that counters Hamlet's and introduces discourses from

outside the play into its oppressive representative world—first from neoclassical tradition, which

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affirms harmonies between subjects and nature, then popular ballad tradition, which unites

people, especially women, “through a common language of jest” (Crocker 42). Ophelia therefore

presents the possibility that art can connect individuals; while Hamlet believes that art can

“mirror” nature and draw out inward flaws spectators conceal from others within their discrete

bodies, Ophelia invokes an artistic tradition that assumes a collective voice.

Even before her descent into madness, Ophelia counters Hamlet's insistence on the

effectiveness of the elite play's capacity to truthfully “mirror” the world (3.2.23). Because she

invokes and is associated with different artistic traditions, she highlights the fact that different

dramatic discourses involve different assumptions, tones, and implications of event – she calls

attention to the fact that insofar as theater mirrors life, it mirrors it with distortions (3.2.23).

Ophelia is a particularly difficult character to pin down because she registers these distortions so

well, and is treated by different characters so “insistently” based on alternative discourses from

different artistic and philosophical traditions (Lyons 69).

Ophelia's Iconographies

Hamlet's outburst at the end of 3.2 reveals that other characters describe Ophelia in terms

of multiple, contradictory narratives regarding codes of female conduct. Hamlet is concerned

about Ophelia's ability to display the signs of certain qualities—honesty, love, and, especially,

virginity—without having the inherent qualities that they represent, but his treatment of her

reveals that the signs themselves do not have “stable” associations to cultural meanings (Lyons

62). He suggests that Ophelia should not believe any man because all men are corrupt and later

claims that women are the deceivers; he vitriolically decries the deception of female sexual

performance immediately after cooly claiming that his romantic pursuit was entirely false. He

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seems to believe both that women are weak and foolish because men deceive them and that

women are dissembling flirts who deceive men with “paintings”—that women “make monsters”

of good men and that men corrupt women because they are “arrant knaves, all” (3.1.141). Thus,

Ophelia figures into another manifestation of the gap between signifier and signified meaning,

which involves not the gap between what things are and what they appear to be, but rather the

unstable connection between visual symbols or behavioral signs and their cultural meanings.

The uncertain symbolic codes surrounding masculine and feminine conduct in Elsinore

reveal that there is a disjunction between the corrupt and political reality of Elsinore and the

classical world from which it imports many of its symbolic associations. Ophelia is the

“persistently” discussed and presented in terms of classical symbolic meanings (Lyons 71).

Hamlet associates her with a “Nymph” (3.2.97) and Gertrude describes her appearance during

her death as being “mermaid-like” (4.1.201). These references indicate that characters often

associate Ophelia with the a notion of virginal innocence rooted in classical myth and pastoral

comedy (Lyons 66). However, when Hamlet discusses Ophelia's virginity in the context of

Elsinore's alternate symbolic order, he breaks its classical associations with beauty and

sweetness, formulating these qualities as oppositional rather than harmonious traits: “the power

of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can

translate beauty into his likeness” (3.2.121-123).

Ophelia draws contrasting symbolic associations into the world of Elsinore not only

through her iconographical associations with classical myth and pastoral comedy but also

through her mad performance of popular ballads in Act IV. In these scenes, Ophelia appropriates

the voices of female characters from yet a different narrative world, and the joviality and

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suggestiveness of the lyrics underscore the extent to which moral evaluations of characters'

conduct are contingent upon the values and assumptions embedded in their environment (Trudell

52).

Introducing popular performance into the play through Ophelia's madness delegitimizes

popular balladry and may extend that delegitimization to women, but “never refuses the

theatrical possibilities” popular ballads afford (Bialo 190). Ophelia's “appropriation” of ballads

during her scenes of theatrical madness places the “voices” of women from popular ballad

tradition into the mouth of a character whose perfect embodiment of expectations for noble

female conduct and temperament have been foregrounded (Bialo 301). The ballads Ophelia sings

depict the circumstances of lower-class female life and reveal the fluidity of the customs,

assumptions, and possibilities of sex for the lower classes. These contrasting dramatic

representations of good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable female conduct in the two

dramatic forms corresponded to a historical difference in the expectations for women of different

social positions regarding sexual conduct. While considered an important female virtue for

women of all classes, chastity was more important for noblewomen whose location in a system

of primogeniture made the enforcement of their virginity a source of more urgent cultural anxiety

(Bialo 300). When Hamlet accosts her in 3.1, Ophelia cannot understand his foreboding

statements about her purity because her modesty does not allow her to grasp the notion that

beauty makes her an object of male sexual desire (Engle 448). But after she is driven mad, she

sings in one “snatch” of a “tune”:

Quoth she, 'Before you tumbled me,

  You promised me to wed.'

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 He answers,

 'So would I ha' done, by yonder sun,

  An thou hadst not come to my bed '(4.5.67-71).

Now, she appropriates the voice of a female sexual initiator whose lover's cold retraction of love

“imaginatively rehearses the consequences against which her father warned her” (Bialo 304).

These different modes of discourse she represents through various popular ballads foreground

the ways in which different dramatic traditions frame gender relations, sexual desire and its

consequences, and the contrasts it sets up among them underscore the ability of dramatic

discourse destabilize and critique the gender hierarchy presented in elite art and espoused in elite

culture. Her appropriation of multiple different female subject voices locates her as a voice

“among other female voices”, registering collective female reactions to “living in a patriarchy”

and foregrounding the ways in which the patriarchal world of the play is responsible for

Ophelia's descent into madness (Bialo 305). Moreover, as Caralyn Bialo suggests, this leaves

open the possibility of interpreting Ophelia's ballad singing as an indication that “Ophelia's

tragedy is produced not only by Elsinore's corruption, but also by a broader patriarchy that

demands her unmitigated submission” (Bialo 306). Revealing how assumptions about female

conduct differ in different artistic worlds and contextualized modes must necessarily undermine

their presentation as fair expectations.

Ophelia's Alternative Tragic Model

In addition to importing the voices and symbolic associations of other artistic modes and

representational worlds into the world of the play, Ophelia temporarily de-centers Hamlet as the

central dramatic figure within the drama's tragic arc, and she presents an alternative model for

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modern tragedy (Pollard 1078). Both Ophelia and Hamlet are tragic figures uniquely suited to

affect the sympathies of contemporary audiences. Because the play was staged during a time of

increasing social mobility, Hamlet's meditation on the unstable relationships between inner self,

outward expression, and identity would have resonated with contemporary anxieties. How, then,

might a playwright construct a tragedy that moves spectators with Hamlet's sensibilities, who

respond to displays of performed lament by dwelling not on their moral implications—for

Hecuba does not prompt Hamlet to the morality of revenge—but on the fact that they are

witnessing an actor playing a role? Ophelia and Hamlet animate two modes of staging tragedy

for audiences with these sensibilities. As a tragic hero, Hamlet evokes pathos through tortuous

uncertainty rather than grieving spectacle, and it is effective for contemporary spectators because

he suspects himself—his motivations, the reality of his own emotions—before they can suspect

him. Conversely, Ophelia is effective because she presents grief absolutely devoid of control or

agency—she does not command attention as Hecuba does but assures spectators that she will

hurry up her lament: “Indeed, la, without an oath, I'll make an end on't” (4.5.62). Her expressions

are urgent, involuntary, and inelegant, and they have no effect. In this way we can pity her

without wondering if she has “forced” her soul so to her “own conceit” to be a tragic figure

(2.2.580).

Ophelia's tragic death complements Hamlet's not only because it parallels his dramatic

arc, but also because her death by drowning registers a desire to bridge the gap between a father's

image and his unreachable self. The “hoar” leaves of the willow tree from which Ophelia falls

recall Polonius, whose “white” beard and “flaxen...poll” Ophelia remembers in her songs

(4.5.219). After Act V's many expositions of the difference between the human body and

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personhood, between their interior soul and the image or “picture” of person and their being—

this figures as an image of Polonius, static and separated from his himself; that the tree's image is

also reflected “in the glassy stream” constitutes an even further removal of image from Polonius

and suggests the possibilities of degrees of distance between sense perception or material and

substantial value (4.7.191). Thus, when Ophelia breaks through the surface of the water as she

falls, she bridges a gap between thing and image of the thing which throughout the play was

heretofore uncrossable.

VI. Ophelia and Meta-drama

Page-Centered and Stage-Centered Power

The physicality of Ophelia's madness foregrounds the bodily mediation that goes into

theater meaning-making, showing that “art involves a continual process of mediation in which

technologies, ideas, bodies, and other structures and forms all, in no preset order, make their

mark” (Trudell 51). In particular, Ophelia's mad singing draws attention to the body of the actor

because singing is highly technical; it foregrounds the distinctiveness of a player's voice and

exposes the fact that the character is being channeled through a real person's body (Trudell 57).

Shakespeare thus exposes his interest in the power of actors over scripts and performance

as an outworking of his own relationship to actors as a playwright. Ophelia enacts the transition

from a performer who follows a script to an anarchic one. Initially, Polonius positions her and

chooses her props: “walk you here […] Read on this book (3.1.47-50). When he dies, she gathers

her own props and tells her spectators what they mean.

The negotiation between “body-centered” and “script-based” playing which Ophelia

foregrounds is also bound up in the play's larger exploration of the distinctions and shared

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traditions between elite and low forms of performance (Bialo 295). During Shakespeare's time,

in response to the social mobility that destabilized socioeconomic and cultural orders of

distinction, members of the noble and elite classes began to “insist” on the moral and aesthetic

authority of printed texts in order to mark the separation of elite tastes from popular culture

(Goldman 422). Not only did this emphasis on the primacy of printed text involve a separation

from ballad culture, which, being oral, lacked barriers to access for the lower classes, but it also

glorified the ability of these printed texts to present a coherent picture of the world, which must

affirm (insofar as they affirmed) “some code of social or artistic decorum” (Goldman 422 ).

Ophelia's performance emphasizes the presentational aspect of dramatic performance at the

expense of the representational aspect both in the sense that she undermines the codes and moral

sensibilities of the rest of the play and in the sense that her bodily, performative gestures call

attention to the body of the performer, which, because it resembles the player's nonfictional self,

calls attention to the mediation between message, script, and performance output (Goldman 422).

Hamlet associates bodily performances with audiences of lower class and grosser tastes

when he gives directions to the players in Act III:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if

you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor

do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently [...] O, it offends me

to the soul, to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags,

to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but

inexplicable dumb shows and noise (3.2.14).

Shakespeare fashions Ophelia's madness after exactly this kind of popular performance. Horatio

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tells the King and Queen that she “hems, and beats her heart... winks, and nods, and gestures”.

That she attracts “hearers” associates her performance with the those the audience members

would have seen often on the streets from minstrels and ballad singers (4.5.10). The Globe

theater would have been surrounded by these participants in the “informal theatrical economy”,

and Ophelia would have echoed onstage what audiences heard immediately outside of the theater

(Bialo 298). This disconnect foregrounds the economic and cultural interdependence of low and

elite dramatic performance even as it underscores the differences between them; while Hamlet

articulates and Shakespeare seems to endorse through the subtlety and intelligent complexity of

this work the artistic superiority of elite theater, he destabilizes the notion that this distinction,

and the class distinction it reinforces, constitutes a system of stable and discrete differentiations.

Moreover, the fact that Polonius has bad artistic taste while the wandering acting troupe has

superior tastes suggests that artistic engagement and the mental agility with which it is associated

is are not synonymous with class distinctions. Furthermore, he problematizes the notion that

social order corresponds to an order of value based on moral capacity. Hamlet suggests that

fishmongers are more honest than Polonius and the royal court of which he is such an

emblematic example (2.2.167). Ophelia's performance engages and destabilizes all of these

interrelated hierarchies – between men and women, nobility and common people, and elite and

popular dramatic tradition.

Ophelia's introduction of the ballad form into a 'high' play invites viewers to critique the

elite theatrical mode of Hamlet and to compare the values of high and low-brow art more

generally. Thus, the disjunction of the dramatic modes registers Ophelia's madness as a

“metatheatrical moment” that calls attention to the theatricality of the play-world of Hamlet's

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Denmark (Bialo 297). In keeping with popular ballad tradition, Ophelia's mad performance is

markedly, self-consciously performative: Horatio reports that Ophelia's ballad recitals drew

spectators “with erratic gestures—she winks, nods, and “beats her heart” (4.5-12). Later, she

seeks out Gertrude as a spectator, and her entreaty for Gertrude, Claudius, and Laertes to

continue listening suggests that she feels she is making a performance (4.5.40). The extent to

which Ophelia's songs would have been familiar to members of Shakespeare's contemporary

audiences and the extent to which Ophelia's entreaties for her audience to listen to her words

would have resembled the familiar calls from minstrels and ballad sellers on the Southwark

streets just outside of the globe—thus, Ophelia “situates” the audience “simultaneously within

and outside Hamlet’s fictional frame” (Bialo 298).

If the purpose of art is, as Hamlet claims, to hold a mirror up to reality so that the source

of the art is hidden while the character of the audience is revealed, Ophelia's performance

collapses this paradigm—effectively breaking the mirror—by performing performance. Because

one of the effects of this meta-performance is to place into dialogue the different worldviews

espoused by different forms of dramatic art, the effect of this “shattering” of the traditional

relationship between audience and work that Hamlet articulates is to call into question the

effectiveness of this mirror, and undermine the claim to authority of high drama over the

sophisticated depiction of reality.

Hamlet states that dramatic performances must be subtle and realistic in order to fulfill

their higher purpose:

suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you

o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of

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playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up

to nature; to show virtue her own image, scorn her own image, and the very age and body

of the time his form and pressure. (3.2.20-24).

Before Ophelia's madness, Hamlet's Denmark makes an extremely powerful and cohesive

dramatic. Shakespeare foregrounds its existence as a fictional cluster of moods and meanings.

Marcellus' articulation of the general sense of unease and oppressive uncertainty and the threat of

violence encapsulates the essence of this world: “There is something rotten in the state of

Denmark” (1.4.95). Ophelia's unrealistic playing undermines the realism of the rest of Hamlet's

realistic, constructed world. Her madness breaks the unity of the play and thus undermines the

“representational world” by calling attention to its theatricality (Bialo 298). Moreover, Ophelia's

death out of doors and her distribution of flowers opens the imaginative frontier of the play to the

natural world and counters the otherwise claustrophobic atmosphere of a play that otherwise

took place almost entirely indoors. And more simply, it presents a rapid and unexpected

discontinuity in the characterization of a significant character. This disjunction destabilizes the

“otherwise seamlessly representational world”, and, with it, its defined values, assumptions,

rules, and associations (Goldman 421). It exposes the tragedy world's value system as a

contextual set of symbolic and moral assumptions and interrogates their values.

Interrogating the Primacy of Script

Hamlet's endeavor to embody a plan for revenge—which requires the instruments of

bodies and weapons—parallels the project of translating a scripted play into a dramatic

performance, and Shakespeare foregrounds these similarities: by having Hamlet stages his own

performances in the form of his feigned madness and The Mousetrap as part of his plan. That

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Hamlet's attempt for absolute control of his plan results in destruction and closure connects to the

play's thematic exploration of words, the fate of words and communications, and Hamlet

repeatedly implies that words stay alive only when they remain open to interpretation.

The scene in Gertrude's closet registers the play's general skepticism about the “dominant

early modern theories of representation, in which authorial inventions may be altered by their

expression in the world but nevertheless defer to a prior realm of meaning” (Trudell 74).

[Ecstasy?]

My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time

And makes as healthful music. It is not madness

That I have uttered. Bring me to the test

And I the matter will reword, which madness

Would gambol from. (ll. 138–42)

Scott Trudell points out that, given Gertrude's inability to see the ghost, Hamlet's claim to be

articulating a definitive “matter” is unfounded, and underscores the impossibility of verifying

that Hamlet's mission materializes a meaning which is in accordance with a truth that is higher.

Hamlet's defensive reference to the myth that humans are healthy when their bodies are in

“heavenly harmony” with the music of the spheres, which they “can mimic but never... hear”

underscores the contingency of his claim to be engaging with meaning which is singular,

definitive, and superior, and therefore absolutely legitimate (Trudell 74). This impossibility of

fixing absolute signification for communications registers the problem of maintaining authority

over the signification of a piece of communication, especially a piece of art. Gertrude's statement

that “words are made of breath, and breath, life” emphasizes the way that communications, once

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delivered, take on a life of their own. Her remark registers the particularly dynamic nature of

speech, which, not being written down, can be misheard or misremembered, can be repeated in

strange new contexts, or can simply vanish. However, Gertrude's comment implies that words

that are not made of breath are not alive, they cease to be powerful and become

“artifacts...delusional “nothings” that vainly seek to determine their significance in advance”

(Trudell 74).

Polonius' obsessive control of his daughter is an attempt to actually restrict her words by

forbidding communication with Hamlet and to fashion her as an iconographical image (Lyons

61). This approach to maintaining her purity is analogous to an attempt to figure Ophelia into a

kind of stable object. Rendered figuratively infertile because she is denied the ability to connect

with others , she cannot conceive or create new things, her speech is “nothing”—only recycled

content that she is unable to harness into something that ends the corruption at court. But just as

violets can grow from Ophelia's dead body, so too can living, creative new masterpieces be

constructed from decomposing low-order material that Ophelia mimes during her madness

(4.5.9).

Just as Ophelia's body returns to the earth where it will grow things, the fate of all art, and

indeed all expression, is to be revised, altered, combined into other things, and ultimately to

diffuse into the collective well of artistic tradition from whence it came and from which

playwrights like Shakespeare himself gather inspiration. Ophelia's appropriation of ballads is

especially fitting because ballads and broadsides make up a particularly diffuse economy of

words and share a tradition with the elite dramatic forms of which Hamlet is an example.

Shakespeare acknowledges the reliance of elite theater on this kind of performance. Shakespeare

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himself plainly rehashes and recombines other works. Moreover, the ballads Ophelia sings fit

easily as a physical metaphor for the “impermanence of all signification” because early modern

ballads, when they were printed, were circulated on ephemera pamphlets and broadsides (Trudell

48). Ballads ended up as either discarded print matter or fragmentary, mostly forgotten auditory

memories. They diffuse into collective narrative memory in a process metaphorically represented

by Ophelia's drowning: she is still singing ballads in “melodious lay” when the water pulls her

down into “muddy death”, where her song rejoins the baser matter of popular tradition in the

same moment that Ophelia's body returns to nature to become organic material (4.7.207-208).

Thus, Ophelia's repetition of popular ballads participates in the play's reflection on the difference

in the possibilities, values, and ultimate legacy of drama from oral and scripted tradition.

The fact that dramatic signification is impermanent and dynamic creates a fixation in the

play on the legacy of dramatic art and playwrights. Hamlet articulates the fact that performance,

especially of the unscripted, clowning type Yorick represents, vanishes in time when he

addresses Yorick's skull: “Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs?” (5.1.196).

Moreover, the fact that Hamlet changes the players' script by adding The Mousetrap registers the

tendency for scripts and stories to change over time. Hamlet's addition also reflects the fact that

in Shakespeare's day scripted plays were often altered during the staging, to the extent that some

printed editions of early modern texts state that they do not contain the additional scenes.

Similarly, Ophelia's spectators cannot decide how interpret Ophelia's mad utterances, suggesting

the possibility that interpretations of her madness will continue to change as spectators “botch

the words up to their own thoughts” (4.5.12). Moreover, Shakespeare registers some of the

contingencies caused by this possibility of alteration after-the-fact in the scene of Ophelia's

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burial, in which the priest, Hamlet, and Laertes argue over funeral rites and how to remember

Ophelia (Trudell 57). A playwright cannot be certain whether he how he or his work will be

remembered because of the impermanent and dynamic nature of all expression, an anxiety

palpably buried in Hamlet's jibe about Denmark's disrespectful lack of mourning for his father:

“Then there's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year: but, by'r lady, he must

build churches then; or else shall he suffer not thinking on” (3.2.142).

VII. Conclusion

Hamlet has outlived Shakespeare's life many times over, and its endurance is due in large

part to the play's complexity and ambiguity; it has fulfilled Shakespeare's theory—which he

stages through Ophelia's madness—that performances with unfixed meanings have superior

imaginative and emotional power. Ophelia is one of the play's most suggestive open endings.

Who is Ophelia? What deep desires, fears, patterns of thought, and inherent, pre-social traits and

tendencies make up her personality? Was her death a suicide? Like the “O” that begins her name,

the other characters figure her as an empty, bounded object, visible only in terms of her

interpersonal relationships and her engagements with external power structures and social

discourses. Even her name suggests her figuration in the play as an embodied metaphor for the

human uterus, a placeholder rather than a concealed personality. She is a mystery that other

characters repeatedly associate with “nothing” (4.5.9). Just as the watchman Bernardo, when

asked if he has seen the ghost on the night that begins the story, replies that he has seen

“nothing”, and Gertrude, when asked the same question in Act IV, tells Hamlet that she sees

“Nothing at all; yet all that is I see,” and that she hears “nothing but ourselves”, Ophelia's

interiority is an absence so complete as to be present (3.4.153). When Hamlet asks if she has

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taken his request to lay his head in her lap as a veiled sexual request, her response, “I think

nothing, my lord,” has a peculiar force (3.2.124). Of her mad utterances, Horatio says, “her

speech is nothing” (4.5.9). The fact that the word 's double meaning as an Elizabethan slang term

for female genitalia registers Ophelia's opacity as an aspect of the distance built into

relationships between men and women both in the world of the play and in the Elizabethan

patriarchal system in which Shakespeare's audiences lived, but more importantly, it connects

Ophelia to the play's interrogation of the assumptions of epistemological logic, and,

consequently, morality.

That Shakespeare locates Ophelia so firmly in this debate emphasizes the problematical

nature of the emphasis Polonius, Laertes, and Hamlet place on the value of her virginity.

Virginity is the ultimate present-absence, a perfect example of a truth on which the functions of

society - both in the world of the play and the world of the audience – depends, yet which is also

unverifiable. Its hiddenness causes severe anxieties while also hindering attempts to articulate or

justify its nature and worth. In foregrounding Ophelia's virginity, Shakespeare underscores the

play's broader examination of how cultures create “shared systems of meaning” and how art can

enforce or undermine those valuations (Lyons 62).

Shakespeare bases Hamlet upon a new model of subjectivity which has become central to

modern western conceptions of the individual. However, it is uncertain whether Hamlet presents

this mode in order to endorse it. What is certain is that Ophelia illustrates the consequences of

this mode of subjectivity, and though her attempts to restore connection and natural harmony fail

within the play, Laertes' mournful expression at her grave scene emblematizes the only kind of

hope imaginable after the utter “havoc” of Hamlet's ending: “Lay her i' the earth; / And from her

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fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring!” (5.1.248).

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Mar. 2017.

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Shakespeare on Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2002. 1-20. Print.

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(2012): 46-76. Project Muse. Web. 7 Mar. 2017.